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There was some discussion in the woodworking thread about the business of professional woodworking and there seemed to be interest in a thread to talk about turning your hobby into a business so this is that thread. I know there are some people in different threads who sell their work, please post about it here! Ask Questions! It's more about the art/design world but there's a decent bit of crossover, and I've found this thread in CC has some good insights: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3468091 This book was recommended to me by a few friends who own small businesses and it was really invaluable to thinking through the process of going out on my own.https://www.amazon.com/Write-Business-Plan-Mike-McKeever/dp/1413323197 Your local library almost certainly has it. Even if it's just a hobby where you occasionally sell stuff and you never need to talk to a banker about getting a business loan, thinking through a business plan is super helpful. What are your projected expenses? Who are your suppliers? Who are your customers? How are they going to find out about you? Does anyone actually want the thing you're making and how much are they willing to pay for it? Can you make money at that price, or do you need to cut costs or rethink your pricing? Or work on your marketing to find someone who will pay the price you need to get? How many doodads do you have to sell to make a living at this? Do you think you can sell that many, and how? Alot of those are questions I hadn't entirely thought through and it was a very helpful exercise. So what do you make? And do you sell it? Or want to sell it?
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May 24, 2023 17:53
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I'm a small scale custom furniture maker. I don't have any help, just me. I've been out on my own for about 5 years and am finally feeling sort of secure and actually have a little bit of money in my business and personal checking accounts. Before that I worked in the same business for 7 years for a guy who had been at it for 40 years. I learned a ton from him about woodworking, about how to run and also how NOT to run a business. He never really cared about deadlines-I try real hard to care about deadlines. Maybe when I'm 60 I too will quit worrying about deadlines.
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May 24, 2023 17:57
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Thanks for the thread! Last year I got (as a gift), "The Intelligent Hand" by David Binnington Savage from Lost Art Press. He was one of those $50,000 dining room table boutique furniture makers. It had a lot about his personal creative process but I was disappointed because I was hoping for more on how he built a client list and interacted with customers, that side of things. If you have any stories or things you want to share about how you advertise, how you build client relationships, all that stuff is what I'd find interesting. There's the old saw about "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" which is pretty vague on what you actually end up doing for a lot of jobs. I love making music but I'd hate to do it professionally. I enjoy working with wood but same thing - enjoying something as a hobby is a lot different from having to do what it takes to make a profit. It seems to me that the people who are successful at what most people do for hobbies (crafts, music, food, etc) enjoy the process for itself. I don't think I could stand spending hours batching out cutting boards or river tables or whatever the latest craft fair hotness is just to make some cash any more than I could spend hours practicing so I could play gigs featuring music that doesn't actually interest me personally.
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May 24, 2023 19:47
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Stultus Maximus posted:There's the old saw about "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" which is pretty vague on what you actually end up doing for a lot of jobs. FWIW this is and always has been bullshit. If you do what you love as your day job, you're actually in quite a bit of risk of overworking yourself, because you're highly motivated and enjoying what you're doing. Every productive activity needs downtime.
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May 24, 2023 20:59
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Stultus Maximus posted:Last year I got (as a gift), "The Intelligent Hand" by David Binnington Savage from Lost Art Press. He was one of those $50,000 dining room table boutique furniture makers. It had a lot about his personal creative process but I was disappointed because I was hoping for more on how he built a client list and interacted with customers, that side of things. If you have any stories or things you want to share about how you advertise, how you build client relationships, all that stuff is what I'd find interesting.
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May 25, 2023 00:41
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whoever came up with that line must have really loved owning a company where everyone else did the work and they got to decide what that work was. I used to be a pro photographer, I really loved photography man, I figured, how bad could doing it for pay be. I don't love photography anymore, kinda have to be prodded into it even for keeping in touch with the family or showcasing my other work. Now I do woodworking (and various woodworking -adjacent things as they catch my interest) as an occasional side gig making a few thousand a year, because when you're making fancy furniture for yourself and your family anyway it's relatively easy to sell a small piece here or there. Very much appreciate having a 9-to-5 that's boring as hell but pays enough and is undemanding enough that I can do pretty much whatever I want in the shop. Used to be a lot more viable to make a bunch of weird art stuff and clean up at a market pre-covid but around here at least the fairs and pop-ups and stuff are still totally fuckin desolate. I lucked into a circle of Arts and Crafts artisans who occasionally send me a client or commission a bunch of picture frames; they're basically ideal clients, looking for stuff that's pretty tasteful compared to the usual custom job and much, much easier to manufacture than I think any non-woodworker realizes, but cranking out the same 100-year-old table design over and over forever as a main source of income still doesn't sound like an improvement on the boring office job A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 15:48 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 25, 2023 00:43
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Stultus Maximus posted:Thanks for the thread! I tend to not care about old saws much at flea markets. Old planes are cool. But, for reals, I had to learn the Rolling Stones corollary (or maybe counter argument) to that- you don't always get what you want to do. But, if you try real hard, you just might find you get what you need to do. Some people are natural born woodworkers (like some of the guys in the thread, and I bow to them) but I don't think I was one. But, I learned to love a lot about the whole, ancient dealie of working with wood.
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May 25, 2023 14:18
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If you don't hate at least part of your job, towards what do you direct your existential angst? I probably don't even qualify as a hobby level crafter, but I think I qualify as an entrepreneur. Market access/share/etc. seems like nearly all the battle. The guy I know who does it successfully is also a longshoreman, which is flexible enough he can skip it to do the crafting when the right job arrives. He's 100% word of mouth / networking.
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May 25, 2023 21:35
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:whoever came up with that line must have really loved owning a company where everyone else did the work and they got to decide what that work was. I used to be a pro photographer, I really loved photography man, I figured, how bad could doing it for pay be. I don't love photography anymore, kinda have to be prodded into it even for keeping in touch with the family or showcasing my other work. I do woodworking as a hobby on the side but stuff has a way of accumulating. I've been thinking of handing a lot of stuff off to one of those outfits where they keep like 50% of the net but handle everything (sales, collecting tax, etc) and just cut you a check at the end. 50% is about the standard art gallery rate so no matter what kind of work I'm doing it's going to pan out in that range. Has anyone ever worked with an outfit like that? Any good or bad experiences? How do you handle taxes on inventory and etc?
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Jun 11, 2023 03:31
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Are you talking about selling your work to a gallery or store? My wife runs a ceramics studio in SF, with a hundred and fifty plus artists, some of whom are production potters, many sell their work, etc. The biggest hurdle with selling on commission is that it's not worth the effort for the retailer unless you can produce a significant volume of work. They don't want to feature something in their gallery, sell it, and then have nothing else to follow up with, and there is an "expense" to them for each artist they feature because they need to be able to speak about who that artist is, what they make, etc. A lot of artists set up a website (there's tools to make that easy nowadays), and use Square or similar to sell directly. Many others go through Etsy, although be aware that Etsy has a sort of dilution factor - there's so much on there that pricing is competitive and you can't make as much per piece as you would through a brick and mortar storefront or your own website, but you may make up for it in volume because of the large customer base. Assuming, again, you can produce volume. Woodworking isn't ceramics, though, so take all of the above with a grain of salt.
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Jun 11, 2023 04:16
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The junk collector posted:they keep like 50% of the net but handle everything (sales, collecting tax, etc) ... Does "net" just mean less sales tax? Does "collecting tax" just mean sales tax? How do you handle taxes on inventory etc now? I'm guessing they don't do your book keeping for you, but it is a guess
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Jun 11, 2023 13:50
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Epitope posted:Does "net" just mean less sales tax? Does "collecting tax" just mean sales tax? How do you handle taxes on inventory etc now? I'm guessing they don't do your book keeping for you, but it is a guess The gallery I’m at takes it out of the retail price. In my state at least, the sales tax is their responsibility.
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Jun 11, 2023 14:09
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Sales tax is kind of complicated and I won't pretend I have great advice or understanding on it. Depending on what you do and where you do it, you may not have to collect it. If you are selling finished goods through a gallery or storefront or w/e then yeah, someone in there should be collecting it- probably the gallery as they are the retailer. My mentor never collected sales tax in 40 years and I never have either-we pay tax on our materials and basically are charging the customer X price for the service of putting those together into the piece of furniture they want. My state doesn't collect sales tax on services. This is more or less how homebuilding/construction works. I'm always a little skeptical that will really hold water but my accountant hasn't told me it's wrong. I guess because everything I do is on commission or repair work its alright. I'm not manufacturing an inventory of goods to be randomly purchased, I'm providing the service of building my customer the particular thing they want.
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Jun 11, 2023 19:38
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The junk collector posted:I do woodworking as a hobby on the side but stuff has a way of accumulating. I've been thinking of handing a lot of stuff off to one of those outfits where they keep like 50% of the net but handle everything (sales, collecting tax, etc) and just cut you a check at the end. 50% is about the standard art gallery rate so no matter what kind of work I'm doing it's going to pan out in that range. Has anyone ever worked with an outfit like that? Any good or bad experiences? How do you handle taxes on inventory and etc? I've been using one small shop or another as effectively a storage locker that sometimes pays me for a while; I don't know how you can sustain a "hobby" of making entire tables and poo poo otherwise. There's only so many bedframes you can fob off on family members before they stop pretending to be grateful, after all. My town is big on "locally crafted" and most of the local craftsmen loving suck so it's not terribly hard to find a place that'll stock my stuff, and I've never had an experience so bad it made the whole thing not worth it. Most galleries I've dealt with work on a commission model, you don't pay sales tax on inventory unless they actually sell it, and when that happens they just take it on top of the sales price and keep ~30-40% of what's left over. AFAICT hobby income is no longer tax-exempt, but it's not hard to work out the income taxes, basically the same as if you've ever had a freelance job. I try to stick to things I either have a good backstock of or (in the case of things like furniture that I don't expect to sell out in a hurry and don't want to store multiples of) could spin up more of on short notice if they start moving, because like Leperflesh said the vendors who'll actually make an effort to move your product really want consistent and reliable suppliers; but if you're really mainly looking to get old projects out of the house a lot of art galleries are run by, like, bored spouses of rich landlords as a hobby and they don't give a poo poo. They also won't make much effort to sell anything though. Online shops aren't a big deal to pop up, but for slightly lower commission rates you're saddled with responsibility for storage and promotion and shipping and taxes. They make a lot more sense once you've established a rep and actually started to sell something in volume, but just starting out (or not looking to go into the business for yourself) you're doing a lot of work for the money. I started selling on Etsy in 2007 and never once sold anything there that wasn't someone I'd been chatting with on a forum or social media or whatever coming in specifically to buy an item I'd showed them, and it's gotten immeasurably worse in the past decade, it's really only for dropshippers. If you think you're ready to cut out the middleman just get a Square account, they'll even give you a cardreader so you can handle in-person sales. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:33 on Jun 12, 2023 |
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Jun 12, 2023 00:04
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Many of the ceramic artists at my wife's studio have reseller's licenses, which allow them to buy materials without paying sales tax (although they have to shop at suppliers who understand what that is). It's as simple as registering a "fictitious business" which is a funny way of saying you're a sole proprietor or something, pay a fee, and you're set. However, they do have to collect sales tax and remit it to the state quarterly, even though a person at the studio collects the money and does receipts. They also have to keep records. If you want to be a sole proprietor you have to actually make a profit at least three years out of five, but you can be a "hobbyist" and that lets you mark costs against sales but you don't get to just deduct costs from your income taxes if you make a loss in a given year. Right now the studio doesn't sell work for people who don't have the reseller's license, because they don't want to deal with doing tax remittance for potentially up to a hundred and fifty artists, especially because the studio doesn't collect a commission (it's a nonprofit). On the other hand, the studio doesn't do online sales, it's just walk-ins that they're covering. I'm sure a ton of those artists also just sell work under the table and do no paperwork or taxes whatsoever. I do not recommend that, but it's obviously a thing. So my guess is that this may vary state to state, you probably need to make sure you ask the right questions when you go to sell through a gallery or store, and regardless if you're doing volume you may want to set up a "business" of some type or another depending on your particular state's laws.
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Jun 12, 2023 01:14
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:I've been using one small shop or another as effectively a storage locker that sometimes pays me for a while Can you talk a bit about how you start a relationship with those shops? Which ones do you reach out to? Do you just walk in and cold talk to someone, or like email first and schedule something? How often do they say "no"?
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Jun 12, 2023 13:10
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I sell in two shops - I had a previous close relationship with the owner of one, and a loose social connection to the owner of the other. For the latter, I went in, introduced myself, chatted the owner up, and asked what she thought about the things I was making and proposing to sell.
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Jun 12, 2023 14:14
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ColdPie posted:Can you talk a bit about how you start a relationship with those shops? Which ones do you reach out to? Do you just walk in and cold talk to someone, or like email first and schedule something? How often do they say "no"? Find one that's just getting started and talk to them or see if they've got a call for artists on their website/Instagram, i get in more often than not. More established shops are much less likely to be interested, they have a set pool of suppliers and generally some acquaintances on a waitlist to fill any gaps and rarely have a reason to take on an unknown. The more people in the local art scene you know, the more different opportunities will come up. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Jun 12, 2023 |
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Jun 12, 2023 15:25
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